The Dandy Warhols to play first show in Bend

Long-running Portland band joins Floater at Oregon Spirit Distillers

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Portland psych-rock band The Dandy Warhols, which will celebrate its 25th anniversary next year, will perform at Oregon Spirit Distillers on Friday with fellow Portland group Floater. (Chad Kamenshine/Submitted photo) - Bulletin

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Portland psych-rock band The Dandy Warhols, which will celebrate its 25th anniversary next year, will perform at Oregon Spirit Distillers on Friday with fellow Portland group Floater. (Chad Kamenshine/Submitted photo)7541734

Portland's The Dandy Warhols will perform for the first time in Bend at Oregon Spirit Distillers on Friday. The band will release a new album later this year ahead of its 25th anniversary next year. (Joe Eisner/Submitted photo) - Bulletin

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Portland's The Dandy Warhols will perform for the first time in Bend at Oregon Spirit Distillers on Friday. The band will release a new album later this year ahead of its 25th anniversary next year. (Joe Eisner/Submitted photo)7541735

As of next year, The Dandy Warhols will have been a band for a quarter-century.

That’s practically a lifetime in the rock ’n’ roll world, a fact that isn’t lost on singer, guitarist and chief songwriter Courtney Taylor-Taylor. It’s all the more impressive considering the Portland alt-rock band survived label shake-ups; a film, “Dig!,” that hurt the band’s reputation in the mid-2000s; and the usual shifts in music trends, while maintaining with three of its original four members.

“I’m meeting with a video director tomorrow,” Taylor-Taylor said from his home in Portland, where the band formed. He was discussing he first single, “Forever,” from The Dandys’ upcoming ninth studio album, “Why You So Crazy,” with GO! Magazine, ahead of the band’s performance at Oregon Spirit Distillers on Friday.

“What we want to do for the video is have ourselves as ghosts going into a high-rise law office at midnight, signing in blood for another eternity as a band,” he continued. “Because that’s kind of what it feels like at this point. It’s just forever, dude.”

Of course, Taylor-Taylor never expected his psychedelic- and power-pop-tinged quartet, known for early 2000s songs such as “Bohemian Like You” and “We Used to Be Friends,” to become elder statesmen of the Portland music scene.

“It takes a fair amount of success to keep a band together for 25 years, and that’s also very rare: somebody truly good enough to exist in the world for 25 years, to still be playing festivals in England and Hong Kong and Sydney and Paris,” he said. “That’s a level that not many bands get to in their life.”

The Dandys — Taylor-Taylor, keyboardist Zia McCabe, guitarist Peter Holmström and drummer Brent DeBoer — will mark a few surprising firsts in Bend, including, well, playing in Bend. The show will also be the band’s first with fellow Portland stalwarts Floater, which is also celebrating 25 years as a band this year. Unlike the Dandys, Floater has regularly visited Bend over the years, and also will play an acoustic show Thursday at GoodLife Brewing.

That The Dandys can play alongside the hard-rocking Floater is perhaps testament to Taylor-Taylor’s band’s wide-ranging sound — from its first few sprawling jam-heavy albums to 2001’s breakout, “Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia,” to the synth-pop-influenced sound introduced on 2003’s “Welcome to the Monkey House” and found, to degrees, on the band’s most recent album, 2016’s “Distortland.” That album was the band’s first in four years, and was an attempt to capture a late-’80s sound, Taylor-Taylor said. He described the upcoming “Why You So Crazy” as “a very interesting and progressive-sounding record” inspired by the social and political climate around the world, particularly in the U.S.

“Everything from, first of all, interactions with strangers to international politics, it’s just a lot of crazy,” Taylor-Taylor said. “I think it certainly pertains more to — I think the U.S. is crazier than most places in the world. People here I think are noticeably a notch crazier than your average person from other countries and other continents.”

Taylor-Taylor said the album should come out in September. The band had some trouble finding the right mastering engineer; as of now, Erik Gavriluk, who also worked on “Thirteen Tales” and created vintage-gear plugins for Pro Tools recording software, is working on the album.

“I’ve tried four mastering engineers,” Taylor-Taylor said. “The first two changed the sound far too drastically. It changed the intention of the record, and it changed what the whole feel and the unique — it eradicated the unique approach and style of the mixing and the style of the recording. And then the third one that I tried is basically the most famous mastering engineer in the world (Bob Ludwig), and he’s very busy.”

Taylor-Taylor has good reason to focus on the details. The original mix of “Welcome to the Monkey House,” done by Russell Elevado (D’Angelo, The Roots, Erykah Badu), was rejected by Capitol Records, leading the band to tap Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes for the final version. In 2009, Elevado’s mix was released on The Dandys’ label Beat the World Records as “The Dandy Warhols are Sound.”

“We ended up with this amazing record that was very urban and very modern and very … cool,” Taylor-Taylor said of Elevado’s mixes. “And the new president of Capitol comes in and he listens to half of one song called ‘I am a Scientist,’ and he says, ‘What is this? It’s not black, it’s not white, what is this? I can’t get this played on radio.’ And I said, ‘What, you mean like Eminem or Elvis, it’s not black, it’s not white?’ He goes, ‘You’re not Eminem or Elvis,’ and I said, ‘Well, obviously we’re not gonna be with that attitude.’”

Following one final album for Capitol, 2005’s “Odditorium or Warlords of Mars,” The Dandys left the label and founded Beat the World.

“Those two records, ‘Thirteen Tales’ and ‘Welcome to the Monkey House,’ those were kind of our sweet spot where we made culturally pivotal records,” Taylor-Taylor said. “And then our relationship was just so tarnished — it had just deteriorated with our record label, so after that we just made a f--- you record. Drop us, please, we want off your label.”

“Odditorium,” also the name of the band’s long-running Portland studio space, coincided with the blow-back from “Dig!,” a film that focused on a trumped-up rivalry between The Dandys and The Brian Jonestown Massacre.

“We acted, we didn’t — we just showed up and (director Ondi Timoner) would have things for us to do for the movie,” he said. “I think (the members of The Brian Jonestown Massacre) were being pretty honest when they were getting really angry and jealous and (stuff) like that, but certainly, we had no idea that they did feel that way back then, and we weren’t told that she was winding them up and getting them to be real spiteful. They weren’t mean to us — we would show up and party like … animals. The movie was a bit of a surprise, a bit of a slap in the face, and a lesson that you don’t just trust a filmmaker to be your friend.”

Earlier this year, Jonestown frontman Anton Newcombe in an interview with Australia’s The Music (themusic.com.au) hinted at playing a show with The Dandys next year outside Melbourne.

“It’s our 25th-year anniversary next year, and we’re going to have a festival, a Dandy Warhols festival, in Australia,” Taylor-Taylor said. “We really would like them to play on it, but it really isn’t — I don’t know if it’s up to Anton whether they do it or not. I think it’s up to his manager, and I don’t know if his manager is going to let him.”